THE FIRST TIME contractor Jared “Cappie” Capp glimpsed Alex Headley was on her first day of kindergarten. He was working on a garage addition at a house next to the bus stop where Alex was waiting. She was hard to miss: For the occasion, Alex was wearing, she recalls, “a pink sweatshirt, pink tutu, pink leggings, pink shoes.” He couldn’t have guessed that within a few years that little girl would be swinging a hammer alongside him on constructions sites—and certainly not in front of TV cameras.
Their shared hometown, Spearfish, S.Dak. (about “an hour and change from Mount Rushmore,” he says), is a small place, and a few years later Alex’s mother, Rachel, happened to hire Capp, a social acquaintance, to gut renovate the family’s home, an 1898 structure…